Rush Into Dawn

Chapter 17

Late one night about a week after the initial attack, Wellku contacted the General across a secure channel reserved for critical diplomatic communication requesting that the General meet him alone at a Rychii research center nearby. He promised the General he would be safe and that he had life and death information regarding the prisoners' safety he needed to discuss. The General was suspicious but figured his personal shields would protect him and he would be tracked the entire time so he summoned his driver and headed out. Upon arrival, the General burst through the door of the meeting house, his rage barely contained, and found Weelku, also alone, in the lobby. "How did you get access to this channel Wellku? Your infamous security seems to be nowhere near as effective as your leaders say it is. I thought it was a Rychii specialty?"

"Oh it is General, but so is loyalty and a deep hatred for invaders. Especially the kind of invaders that would wrap us in a velvet prison so they might slowly and gently cover our eyes and blind us while they steal the very soul of our people."

"That would be the Given, I suppose? Poetic words but that is quite a paranoid interpretation of events, even for an extremist such as yourself. Should the Given and Rychii come to an agreement, you would likely almost never see us not because we would blind you to events but because frankly because we have more important things to do elsewhere. Why some among us considered your primitive planet worth saving is beyond me. To me, Rychii is nothing but a cauldron of untamed savages who have spent millennia doing little but killing each other and are centuries away from accomplishing anything that might interest the rest of the civilized universe. You accuse the Given of senseless killing but that shows that the only thing you know less about than Given motivations is your own Rychii history books. We would have better served to leave you to the real invaders that roam these systems. Should they find you, the Rychii would learn the real meaning of terror beyond anything you thought possible and your petty complaints about the Given would crumble to dust. Ignorant fools!

"Quite sure of yourself, aren't you General? Well, you can save your empty concern for some other weak tribe that might actually believe it. We'll take our chances without Given interference and so the first step is to rid ourselves of you. The great general of the Morta turned statesman and spy. Your loss might weaken the grip of the Given on our little rock, might it not?

The General scoffed aloud, "And how will you accomplish that Wellku, your weapons cannot penetrate our personal shields, as you well know. And you must also be aware that we are required to always have the fields active due to the deadly bioagents?"

"We are, General, we are. But we've been working on a little something since the Given arrived for our first round of talks, adapted from your own tech by the way. Burrowing transport nanobots are what my engineers call them. Not sure what they were being used for originally but they are interesting in that they proved to be a perfect vehicle for transmitting the Host and Guest. Yes, the infamous bioagents have a name and we understand their cycle much better than we have shared with you to date though they continue to be a source of mystery to even our best scientific minds. They have been with us as long as there has been an "us", interwoven with our evolution, so unsurprisingly a deep complicated shared history exists, one that you would not find in the history books you have been so diligently reading. Pairing this deep knowledge with the nanobots, your nanobots, has made it possible for us, the stupid little primitive Rychii, to penetrate your envirosuits and force fields with the bioagents of which you have now become very infected General. To make it even better, we used a new strain, the Host and Guest are quite a melting pot of mutations and variants you see, that cannot be cured by any known tech. Those are quite iffy anyway, death rates are alarmingly high, even among the Rychii who have evolved to tolerate tinkering with their presence.